Naughty Dog investigating The Last of Us’s poor PC performance
Once again, shaders are here to make fools of us all.
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Update: Naughty Dog has sincereleased a hotfixto address the performance issues.
Original story:Seasoned PC gamers are used to dealing with the wonderful world of very buggy ports. Sometimes they’re infuriating game-breaking issues, but more often than not they’re just dumb, or annoying. The PC port for Naughty Dog’s hit The Last of Us had fans very excitedwhen it was announced last year, but it seems we’ve been offered helpings ofboth kinds of bugsin equal measure. While this has left many fans upset with their experience, the good news is Naughty Dog is aware and already at work investigating many common problems.
Naughty Dog has listed the known issues for the PC version of The Last of Us Part 1 on the officialPC support page. They range from shader problems—which likely just lead to weird visuals—to the game not booting at all. The post comes with the promise that these bugs are all being investigated and worked on, with the promise of future patches coming to the rescue.
The first two problems in the list both refer to shadings, with one highlighting load times and the other focusing on stability and performance. We’ve run into plenty of shader issues with this game ourselves, leading us to brand itanother bad PC port.It’s not uncommon for modern PC games to run into these problems with shader compiling, but it can make games completely unplayable depending on how badly it affects your system.
Issues with older graphic drivers are also cited as leading to stability issues and graphical errors. Hopefully most people will be able to upgrade their drivers and no longer have these issues, but plenty of folks are running older cards that should still be able to handle the modestPC requirementson lower settings. This could also be exacerbated by shader issues, so hopefully we’ll see both these issues fixed asap.
Another system requirements issue is straight up not being able to boot the game, despite meeting and even exceeding the minimum requirements. These poor gamers won’t even get to seeJoel’s amazing eyebrowsfor themselves until this issue is put to bed.
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Memory leaks are also listed as a potential known issue, which suggests something is causing a severe RAM spike. Memory leaks aren’t that uncommon a bug in newly released games and were recentlyterrorizing Hogwarts Legacy playerstoo.
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Closing out the list are mouse and camera jittering problems, which seems to depend on hardware and display settings. This could be related to any of the other issues listed above, or something new in its own right. Regardless of how many problems there are, here’s hoping Naughty Dog can get out a patch to fix as many of them as possible soon.
While the game has only been out for a few days, these issues have already caused plenty of backlash from fans expecting better from the port. Especially given Sony has had reasonable success porting games likeMarvel’s Spider-ManandReturnalwithout anywhere near this level of trouble.
Hope’s been writing about games for about a decade, starting out way back when on the Australian Nintendo fan site Vooks.net. Since then, she’s talked far too much about games and tech for publications such as Techlife, Byteside, IGN, and GameSpot. Of course there’s also here at PC Gamer, where she gets to indulge her inner hardware nerd with news and reviews. You can usually find Hope fawning over some art, tech, or likely a wonderful combination of them both and where relevant she’ll share them with you here. When she’s not writing about the amazing creations of others, she’s working on what she hopes will one day be her own. You can find herfictional chill out ambient far future sci-fi radio show/album/listening experience podcastright here.
No, she’s not kidding.
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